Occupied buildings. Smashed windows. Tent encampments. Antisemitic sloganeering. Masked mobs cheering terrorist organizations. The scenes at dozens of America’s best-known colleges look like a dystopian cinema.
It’s an emotional tableau, and most of the commentary has reflected that. But the denunciations and deflections don’t offer much of a way forward. What should campus leaders do? Is there a better course than dithering, kowtowing and then issuing panicked calls to local police?
There just might be.
It starts by clearing up a bit of confusion: This spring’s campus clashes have prompted much discussion about free speech. It’s vital that colleges support free inquiry and the robust exchange of ideas. But tent-erecting, masked mobs are, of course, generally not deemed tools of free inquiry or civil discourse.
We need to be clear that institutions of higher education exist for a particular reason: to serve as places of teaching, learning, discourse and scholarship. Their mission is not to serve as a bucolic backdrop for irate students (or masked non-students). Leaders should be very clear that performance art, whatever the underlying agenda, should not impede the core work of the institution.
If we start there, what should leaders do?
First, be very clear why institutions of higher education exist. The overwhelming majority of students and faculty are there to engage in the core work of teaching and learning. That mission is why the public helps underwrite thousands of public colleges and universities (and why it provides vast sums in loans, grants and aid to private ones).
Given that, it’s been extraordinary to see campus leaders at institutions like Columbia and Northwestern cancel in-person classes or be bullied into promising specific new faculty hires for fear of agitators who mock that mission. Campus leaders should instruct students who refuse to respect that mission to take their performance to more suitable environs.
Second, educational institutions have every right (and obligation) to establish viewpoint-neutral time, place and manner rules governing campus speech. Campus leaders should even-handedly adopt and enforce far more stringent guidelines for what’s appropriate to a college campus. Regardless of the viewpoint in question, leaders should ensure that all speech is offered at a time, in a place and in a manner consistent with a due respect for teaching, learning and free inquiry. This means no tents or encampments (which can make it easy for non-student agitators to provoke mayhem) and no disruption of classrooms, libraries or talks.
Third, leaders should get serious about the consequences for misconduct. Much of the current chaos is due to students thinking that no one is serious about enforcing the rules. That’s a reasonable conclusion on their part; over the past decade, we’ve seen leaders consistently balk or back down when facing a disruption. This is a familiar challenge for any educator. When authority figures appear intimidated or fearful, some students will be tempted to test them. Leaders must make clear that they will arrest, expel or prosecute miscreants — and then follow through. Such a stance will set clear boundaries while reassuring the quiescent 95 percent of students that the rules apply to everyone.
Fourth, campus leaders need to make clear that they understand why have been accused of flagrant hypocrisy. It’s because their institutions spent the past decade in a moral panic over microaggressions, improper pronouns and appearances by conservative speakers. Campus leaders seemed remarkably unperturbed while politically incorrect students and faculty were sanctioned and right-leaning speakers were disinvited and shouted down.
The same rules need to apply, whether or not the views in question accord with campus groupthink. Leaders need to acknowledge that today’s tolerance for pro-terrorist encampments and chaos constitutes an astonishing U-turn and convince skeptics that policies will be more even-handedly administered going forward.
Fifth, campus leaders should explicitly sketch an institutional vision that addresses these concerns and can win back public trust. A commitment to free inquiry means disavowing ideologically loaded DEI pledges, putting an end to politicized institutional statements and doing far more to recruit an intellectually diverse faculty and student body. It entails a commitment to academic rigor and to higher expectations for students and faculty alike. It means campuses must be places for robust exchanges and civil discourse, with exchanges that are respectful even when uncomfortable. And it means getting students off their phones and mentoring them in what it means to engage as a mature, educated adult.
This won’t solve all the problems on campus. But it offers a starting point for leaders ready to do more than duck criticism or call the cops.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.